For hundreds of years, indigenous people of the American Southwest, whether on the move or in permanent settlements, traded among themselves. Archeologists have found shells from the Pacific Ocean, parrot feathers from Mexico, and turquoise from dist...

For hundreds of years, people of the American Southwest traded among themselves. They used a system of barter to exchange everything from furs, bison hides, foods, woven material, and clothing to pottery, beads, feathers, and turquoise. The establish...

Two events in the early 1880s marked a turning point in the development of the region. The effects of the first, the arrival of the railroad in 1880, were quickly felt; the effects of the second, the final confirmation of the Tierra Amarilla Grant in...

Sallie Wagner writes of her days running a trading post with her husband on the Navajo reservation in the 1930s and 1940s.

When my husband and I bought the trading post, the Navajos in the area were making very poor rugs, the kind that were sold from knocked-together stands along Highway 66. The wool was not well cleaned or well spun. The bordered designs were the kind t...

A Navajo trader defends his profession against charges made by Jake Morgan, a former member of the Navajo Tribal Council.

The unwarranted attack on the traders to the Navajo Indians by Jake Morgan, former member of the Navajo tribal council, and the subsequent denial by the United Indian Traders Association, brings to an issue the status of the trader in Navajo affairs....